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Wednesday, Jul 25, 2012, 12:44 pm

The ‘Dark Knight’ Takes on Occupy

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Christopher Nolan’s new film, Dark Knight Rises, is everywhere. It was the backdrop to horrendous Aurora shooting, still managed to debut with $160.9 million at the box office, and has spawned a crazy amount of chatter in the blogosphere. But the level of commentary on the film has generally been so low that I felt tempted to join in – before actually having the chance to watch the film. I held off and was finally was able to see it last night, but since I’m late to the party, I’ll just point to some of the more interesting pieces on the movie's politics.

Dark Knight Rises is unabashedly conservative anti-Occupy agit-prop, which makes it all the more interesting because Hollywood, though not quite the Pinko paradise the Right imagines, is dominated by liberals. The film’s villains are demagogic populists who assemble a crew by feeding off class resentment and poverty.

Ross Douthat over at the New York Times defends the film from a conservative perspective:

His model, as the movie’s literary references make clear, is “A Tale of Two Cities” rather than “Atlas Shrugged,” which means that he’s trying to simultaneously acknowledge the injustices of the existing regime while suggesting that both the revolutionary and anarchic alternatives would be much, much worse. Across the entire trilogy, what separates Bruce Wayne from his mentors in the League of Shadows isn’t a belief in Gotham’s goodness; it’s a belief that a compromised order can still be worth defending, and that darker things than corruption and inequality will follow from putting that order to the torch. This is a conservative message, but not a triumphalist, chest-thumping, rah-rah-capitalism one: It reflects a “quiet toryism” (to borrow from John Podhoretz’s review) rather than a noisy Americanism, and it owes much more to Edmund Burke than to Sean Hannity.

From the Left comes Gavin Mueller’s argument that Dark Knight Rises side-steps politics, because it doesn’t actually depict a popular movement.

There is barely any evidence of “the people” at all – it’s all cops and mercenaries battling it out. So instead of a real insurrection, the takeover of Gotham functions via Baroque conspiracies among elites struggling for status and power.

Nolan is attracted to the aesthetics of protest and class struggle, but can’t help but portray the rabble in cartoonish fashion. Aaron Bady’s arguments overlap with Mueller’s:

It is a measure of Hollywood/Nolan’s chicken-shittedness — in that they love the spectacle of reactionary counter-revolution but don’t have the heart to show us dead leftists — that the entire 5 month period of “occupation” is resolved with barely a trace of lingering hard feelings, that after 5 months of dividing Gotham between collaborators and the resistance, everybody’s happy to just call it a day and worship the bat statue or something.

[…]

If this movie had any guts, it would have — and almost did — show us Batman fighting against the people of Gotham: as they fall under the spell of Bane’s message of radical wealth redistribution, and as they turn against what used to be the status quo, the only thing Batman would find himself able to do is kill the bejeezus out of whole bunches of them. It mostly pulls back from that; the people we see the cops beating up are not citizens, but a hyper organized criminal conspiracy.

But there’s one striking thing about this conversation and that’s that we’re having it in the first place. The present economic crisis and the emergence of Occupy have managed to change the discourse about inequality and social change to the point where the plot of a film like Dark Knight Rises attracts attention for its political content. A conservative backlash in the form of a summer blockbuster is a good sign. Can anyone imagine something of the sort happening even at the peak of the anti-globalization movement?

Is America entirely peopled only by characters from comics? What King made Batman a knight?

Posted by valles on 2012-07-31 01:36:50

Judging from the comments i guess nolans cowardly "chickenshittedness" defeated his attempt to smear the occcupy movements- these here peoples love them some Dark Knight movie, but they dont see the capitalist saving, establishment affirmng. "centrist" message nolan would have them bite down on...or probably,Americans are hoplessley depoiticized and are incapable of making any such kind of connection....that could work in our favor, at times.

Posted by marcus nestor on 2012-07-27 13:11:30

It seems more likely to me that people who can't see the heavy-handed political rhetoric in the movie, or those that think the origins of the franchise would prohibit such polemicism are in fact the idiots here. It's fine if you don't want to look any deeper than explosions and car chases, but that doesn't mean you're in a position to mock those that have a mind to.

Posted by Jenks on 2012-07-26 05:29:07

It's older than that, actually. The Nolans based it off of A Tale of Two Cities more than a specific comic. Not only Dark Knight Rises, but also A Tale of Two Cities can address issues related to OWS and The Tea Party even though it was written a hundred and fifty years before.

Posted by John G. on 2012-07-26 03:47:46

The themes of occupy are timeless. A film can say something about an event, even if it wasn't written with that event in mind. The film can still have a perspective on the issues behind any given event, without knowing any details of the event in question.

Posted by John G. on 2012-07-26 03:42:13

Is this title meant to be the Dark Knights' take on Occupy, or the Dark Knight takes on Occupy. One is pointing out the film's perspective, the other is talking about the different takes that people had on the film as it relates to Occupy.

I was confused by exactly this as well while watching the film. On the one hand, the movie chastises the wealthy elite who have lived so large, while others suffered, and yet the film also portrays a silly French Revolution style of dragging the rich from their mansions and trying them in a commoner court of madness. It seems to clearly say that the rich are holding on to too much, but that rule by the actual people would be folly. Is there something being said at all here, or is Nolan just throwing darts on a board?

Posted by John G. on 2012-07-26 03:36:36

I like Occupy. I like the Batman movie. Get a grip, hombre.

Posted by Miguel Esteban on 2012-07-26 02:31:04

nolan is overrated, and this film is indeed reactionary crap. the fanboys who enjoyed this are obviously too dumb to see the political subtext, hence the "its just a movie man!" dumb people watch dumb movies, thats why hollywood rakes it in

Posted by camron on 2012-07-25 22:53:24

Did you miss the part where Bane was going to detonate a massive bomb in Gotham? Batman wasn't defending the 'compromised order', rather protecting the millions of people that were going to die.

Posted by Jared on 2012-07-25 19:41:21

I know the headline doesn't match your no-real-thought-put-into piece, but ya, this movie had nothing to do with OWS. it was largely written and filmed pre-ows.

Posted by Brett Banditelli on 2012-07-25 19:41:15

What is this i don't even...I mean, you know the plot of this movie is based off of a comic book written in the 90's, right? You know, 15-20 years before tea party or OWS? What the hell is wrong with people today? If you see politics in every freaking thing, you are probably an idiot. Just sayin'....

Posted by Chris Magerl on 2012-07-25 19:01:38

Did you guys see the same film that I did?

Posted by Derek Rife on 2012-07-25 16:05:50

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Dispatches on social movements in the United States and around the globe, edited by In These Times Assistant Editor Rebecca Burns.